My latest research just published online at the Journal of Urban Affairs
ABSTRACT: Community empowerment movements challenge local government administrators and planners to emphasize people instead of development profits in the planning process. Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are popular tools to advance this objective. Executed by and between local governments, communities, and project developers, CBAs detail how economic benefits from new development are shared with residents. One question understudied in the literature is how does a community know if it received an equitable distribution in a CBA? In this case study of a new $1.6 billion satellite campus for the University of California, documents in and out of the public domain are analyzed to determine what economic benefits could be shared with the community, what portion was disclosed to the community, and what portion of the benefits were included in the CBA. A key recommendation from the findings is to build a CBA metric that local governments and communities can use to establish an early target value for benefits before negotiations with project proponents.
Bill Farley (2023) Disrupting the knowledge and power imbalance in Community Benefits Agreement negotiations: Lessons from the Aggie Square development in Sacramento, California, Journal of Urban Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/07352166.2022.2155527
The accepted manuscript is available here.
If you don’t have access to JUA and need a copy of the published article send me an email.
Bill Farley, Ph.D. 